Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself. Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense. [more inside]posted by standardasparagus at 6:13 PM PST - 24 comments

The Cast New Yorker: - What happened to Alberto Nisman? El Pais : - Argentinean prosecutor drafted arrest warrant for Fernández de Kirchner.WSJ : - First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?NYT : -Reining In Argentina’s Spymasters. Grauniad : - Argentina investigates mystery DNA found at dead prosecutor's home. Arutz Sheva : - Aide Who Gave Gun to Nisman is Fired.Bloomberg : - Who and where is Antonio Stiuso? Grauniad : - The shady history of Argentina’s Intelligence. posted by adamvasco at 5:50 PM PST - 20 comments

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind "Friedmann’s journey from connexins to spinal opsins shows that, even in this day and age, it can be tough to predict what a scientist is going to find when digging into some well-defined problem, like synchronized activity in the spinal cord. Scientists are used to experiments turning up empty, but every now and then, they unexpectedly strike gold (and live for those moments)." posted by dhruva at 4:19 PM PST - 9 comments

Outlawry, Supervillians, and Modern LawBefore the modern period, the ability of the courts to enforce their authority was quite limited, shockingly so by modern standards. ...So what was the legal system to do? Well, one common tool was “outlawry”, declaring a person to be beyond the protection of the law. The meaning of the sentence changed over time, and it ultimately disappeared with urbanization and doctrines like habeas corpus, but a growth in supervillainy might bring it back into fashion.posted by Michele in California at 11:26 AM PST - 25 comments

Writer John Reed remembers growing up as a kid in New York in the 1970s, when his mother, artist Judy Rifka, was friends with queer artists like Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz, under the lurking presence of AIDS. posted by larrybob at 11:04 AM PST - 16 comments

"It's Schrödinger's cat, unknown unless I examine it. Boy day or girl day? Let me open the box and check. These days it's usually a boy day, but there have been long stretches of time when I'm usually girl, and I'm sure there will be again. Sometimes it's neither; I open the box and can't tell whether the cat's alive or not. And frequently, it's both at once. A tuxedo cat, black AND white all at the same time, not sometimes black and sometimes white."
Writer Naamah Darling describes identifying as genderfluid. [more inside]posted by quiet earth at 10:16 AM PST - 69 comments

Or so say researchers in a new study in the February 9 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Here's their paper's abstract: "Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora
in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence
of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that
(i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity
bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent
between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias
is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these
general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the
emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora.
We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct
physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement
of the emotional content of large-scale texts."
And here are descriptions of the research in Science Daily and the LA Times. posted by Sir Rinse at 8:41 AM PST - 43 comments

Unlike the enormous and comprehensive Debt, Utopia of Rules is mostly argument, not history. It sets out to investigate the problem of "bureaucracy" -- basically, rules, and the simmering threat of violence that underpins them. Hidebound adherence to awful, runaround bureaucracy was always the sin laid at the feet of slow-moving, Stalinist states under the influence of the USSR. Capitalism, we were told, was dynamic, free, and open. But if that's so, why is it that since the USSR imploded, bureaucracy under capitalism has exploded? If you live in a western, capitalist state, you probably spend more time filling in paperwork, waiting on hold, resubmitting Web-forms, attending performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, training meetings, and post-mortems than any of your ancestors, regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain they lived on.

The great thing about social media is that it lets you contact potential customers directly. However, if you're offering a service such as offering to sell tiny plots of land in Scotland to those who wish to style themselves Laird or Lady of Glencoe you should perhaps be up on Scottish property law. Because if you're not, you're quite likely to make the rapid acquaintance of one or two people who do. McPwnage ensues. Includes bonus reference - at no extra cost! - to a drunk Finnish rock singer. posted by Devonian at 6:23 AM PST - 67 comments

She was a highly- prolific actress of the ’50’s/’60’s/’70’s/’80’s, a record-setting female aviator, an original member of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women, and one of the only women directing major TV shows in the 1980’s. Tragically taken by cancer in 1990, she’s been inexplicably forgotten by the industry to which she gave so much of herself.

In Guatemala, the legal age of marriage is 14 with parental consent, but in Petén, in the northern part of the country, the law seems to be more of a suggestion. Underage brides are everywhere. They parade endlessly through Petén’s hospital in San Benito, seeking medical care. Most have traveled from the villages along the mud-soaked roads that flow out in all directions.
I visited almost a dozen of these villages to meet some of the child brides of Petén for the latest Too Young to Wed transmedia project, this one a partnership with the United Nations Population Fund. Guatemala was the 10th country I had worked in documenting the issue of child marriage since 2003, after a chance encounter with several young brides in Afghanistan.posted by josher71 at 6:14 AM PST - 4 comments

A new counselling service harnesses the power of the text message. Depression is common among teens, and its consequences are volatile: suicide is the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of ten and twenty-four. In that same age group, the use of text messaging is near-universal. The average adolescent sends almost two thousand text messages a month. They contact their friends more by text than by phone or e-mail or instant-message or even face-to-face conversations. For teens, texting isn’t a novel form of communication; it’s the default. posted by ellieBOA at 4:48 AM PST - 45 comments

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